Rosie Weiss
15 x 11 1/4 in
Courtesy Spill Projects
The National Gallery of Victoria, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Artbank & The National Gallery of Australia.
Weiss makes work about her/our relationship to the natural world. She finds plant fragments on the edges of human activity, paths, bush tracks, school play grounds, city streets, logging tracks, farms, her garden and by the sea. These fragments have often been worn down by wear and tear, including fire, to their essential structures, they then form the basis of her practice as she attempts to give them a voice.
Appearing in works from the early 80’s to the present most of the plant fragments have lived on to appear in the Installation at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, ‘On the edge’ 2019. This collection of over 400 land and sea plants collected over 40 years and referenced in the retrospective shown alongside, prints, paintings and works in paper, is part of the show ‘In the valley’ a group climate change show curated by Danny Lacy and included in the Climarte Festival.
“Weiss’ work has a spiritual entanglement with the landscape, her drawings and paintings of natural objects often anthropomorphise into body parts, exploring the symbiosis between the body and nature.” Danny Lacy 2019
In the winter of 2015 Weiss spent time at the Police Point Residency, Point Nepean. It was here she witnessed ‘An extreme erosion event ‘ (Parks Victoria beach closure signage). The trees were falling into the sea faster than she could draw or photograph them. These fragments become the beginning of the series ‘The trees are falling into the sea and other stories ‘ 2015-17, which eventually involved collecting fragments from the whole of Port Phillip Bay dislodged by channel deepening & sea level rises.

